1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of computer graphics and networked wireless communication.
2. Description of the Related Art
The World-Wide-Web, e-mail and instant messaging have revolutionized team collaboration, together with applications such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft Groove. The availability of mobile computing devices, together with access to the Global Positioning System (GPS) network are starting to bring the tools available for fixed location team collaboration to any place at any time. Devices such as the RIM Blackberry and the Palm Treo have brought e-mail to mobile devices with great success, but their effectiveness is certainly limited compared to the environment available to systems designed for use in fixed locations, in many cases due to interface and usability problems. Tools that work exceptionally well in an office environment prove themselves grossly inadequate for the same tasks when they need to be performed in the field and, in many cases, under pressure and adverse circumstances, as is often the case for rescue teams, military operations, law enforcement, infrastructure repair crews, and other teams that need to get a job done quickly and with efficient coordination. Currently, those teams typically rely on radio or cellular network communications without the capability of storing information to be shared; or they use text-based messaging/electronic mail systems that are hard to integrate with what is happening on the field and where it is taking place.
In addition, browsing the World Wide Web on mobile devices is a much less rewarding experience than doing so on larger computers. Small screens, cumbersome interfaces and slow update speeds limit the usability of mobile devices.
Recent trends in Internet content generation have seen the appearance of geotags—XML fields added to a web page that provide exact latitude and longitude coordinates. All of this is fostering developments in Internet mapping and cartography, from the original Internet maps to advanced applications such as Google Maps, Google Earth and Microsoft's TerraServer.
These applications use traditional maps and computer graphics renderings of real world satellite imagery to allow users to view and navigate locations, access content and interact with the information available on the web with geographic locality. The appearance of geolocation tags on web content are enabling applications to be used not just for mapping but to display Internet search results for localized areas—services such as Yahoo! and Google Local allow the user to search for restaurants close to a given location, and display the returned results on a map.
Maps are ideal for fixed-location computing with large displays, but the small screen sizes and interfacing constraints of mobile devices can limit their usability in mobile applications. In addition, a map has to be interpreted by the user and reconciled with her actual position in the real world, sometimes requiring significant effort to understand fully the information represented on the map.
Military aircraft have long incorporated a different type of display, the Heads Up Display (HUD), where a representation of the aircraft instruments is displayed on a see-through mirror and superimposed over the out-the-window scene the pilot sees through the aircraft's canopy. HUD systems have repeatedly proven to increase pilot effectiveness and response time. Recently, HUD systems have appeared on civil aircraft and even in automobiles.
Augmented reality is a branch of computer graphics that focuses on the incorporation of interactively-rendered imagery into real-world scenes. In most cases, it is implemented by using see-through head-mounted displays (HMDs) where the user can see both the real world surrounding her and a perspective-matched computer graphics rendering of objects in the scene. The field was pioneered by Ivan Sutherland, who introduced the first see-through HMD in 1968.
Augmented reality has been used for applications such as aircraft maintenance training and navigation in complex environments such as a factory floor, where the user can see information displayed over the real scene, annotating the real world. Some recent projects such as “A Touring Machine” developed at Columbia University in 1997 allow annotation of real world locations and interaction with geographically tagged database content on a transportable computing device.
While some existing wireless data communications tools such as text messaging, e-mail and instant messaging can be useful, making use of those while deployed in the field is cumbersome and inefficient. A limitation of these systems is that even though the information shared might have relevance to a specific physical location, these systems do not adapt the presentation of the information according to the perspective from one's location. Representing geographically tagged data on a map can improve the efficiency and has been used by certain DARPA military unit test wireless communication systems, but this forces the team members to constantly re-interpret the map and its correspondence to the real world scenario around them as they move, something made harder by the small screen real estate available on mobile devices.